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Miscellany of Middle English religious verse and prose

Archive Item: BC MS 501 Contains records with digital media

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Details

Type of record: Archive

Title: Miscellany of Middle English religious verse and prose

Other titles: Prick of Conscience

Level: Item

Classmark: BC MS 501

Publication city: [South Lincolnshire, England]

Date(s): [ca. 1450s]

Language: Latin

Size and medium: 1 v. (iii, 122, iii leaves) (1 column, 36-46 lines)

Persistent link: https://explore.library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/118292

Collection group(s): Medieval Manuscripts

Description

Decoration: 2 to 3-line initials in red with pen ornamentation in brown. Capitals touched in red. Catchwords in cartouches. Occasional pointing hand.


Written in anglicana (main text) and anglicana formata (headings and Latin quotations), by a single scribe (possibly to be identified as M.R., 'secundum M.R.' f. 67v) writing at different times.


The major item is the Prick of Conscience (ff. 1r-58v), beginning imperfectly. For a full list of contents, see Pickering 1990.


Purchased by the Brotherton Collection, from Francis Edwards, in 1950.


See for a fuller description: K. W. Humphreys and J. Lightbown, 'Two Manuscripts of the Pricke of Conscience in the Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds', in: Leeds Studies in English, nos. vii-viii (1952), pp. 30-34; R. Hanna III, 'Leeds University Library, MS Brotherton 501: A Redescription', in: Manuscripta, 26 (1982), pp. 38-42; N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) pp. 67-70; and O. S. Pickering, 'Brotherton Collection MS 501: A Middle English Anthology Reconsidered', in: Leeds Studies in English, N.S. 21 (1990), pp. 141-165, which provides full references to other scholarship.

Features

Bindings


20th-century half calf binding, marbled paper, gold lettering on spine.

Provenance

The dialect has been localised to south Lincolnshire. 16th-century ownership inscriptions include the names of members of the Sheldrake family and (three times) Thomas Pell. Sold by Sotheby's in 1929 as the property of the late Sir F.S. Powell of Horton Old Hall, Bradford. It appeared in a succession of Maggs Bros. catalogues from 1930 to 1940. Sold by Sotheby's to the bookseller Francis Edwards in March 1949.

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